‘Every word in him is a picture.’ He said the same thing in a fine quatrain of the poem to Richard Bentley, contrasting the great masters of old with the poets of his own day, especially with himself, whose poems Bentley was illustrating:
‘But not to one in this benighted age
Is that diviner inspiration giv’n
That burns in Shakespeare’s or in Milton’s page,
The pomp and prodigality of heaven.’
In another letter to West of the same year he defends the practice of ‘judiciously and sparingly’ inserting phrases from Shakespeare into modern poetry because of their greater energy; a practice which he himself was to adopt in his later odes. Gray’s Shakespearian borrowings are always judicious, but it may be questioned whether the effect of such quotations from a greater writer by a less is not to create an impression of poverty in the borrower. It is more important to inquire how far Gray was successful in emulating the Shakespearian ‘pomp and prodigality’ of imagination. The prodigality clearly was beyond even his ambition. His Pegasus always required the spur rather than the reins. But the pomp, it must be admitted, he did not infrequently achieve. No one can be blind to the magnificence of the lines about Pindar in the ‘Progress of Poesy’:
‘Oh! Lyre divine, what daring Spirit
Wakes thee now? Tho’ he inherit
Nor the pride, nor ample pinion,
That the Theban eagle bear